AIDS/Holocaust: Metaphor and French universalism

Esprit Createur

Volumn 45, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 63-73

  Caron, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249247431     PISSN: 00140767     EISSN: 19310234     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/esp.2010.0257     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. See Léon Poliakov, L'Âge de la science, vol. 2 of Histoire de l'antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1981). The pagination refers to the Points Seuil edition.
2. From Archives parlementaires, Assemblée nationale, 23 December 1789, 756;
3. quoted in Dominique Schnapper, "Les Juifs et la nation" in Pierre Birnbaum, ed., Histoire politique des juifs de France: entre universalisme et particularisme (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1990), 299. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
4. Pierre Birnbaum, Les Fous de la république: histoire politique des Juifs d'État de Gambetta à Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 487. The pagination refers to the Points Seuil edition.
5. Pierre Birnbaum, "Introduction" in Histoire politique des juifs de France, 11-17.
6. Michel Wieviorka, "Le Juif, figure de l'étranger?" in Michel Wieviorka, ed., Une société fragmentée?: le multiculturalisme en débat (1996) (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 267-87.
7. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallenstein, Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës (1988) (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), 57; original emphasis.
8. Étienne Balibar, La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et après Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 339-40.
9. The idea that the emancipation may produce the opposite effect of what it claims is not entirely new. As Alain Dieckhoff reminds us, Max Nordau, the nineteenth-century German (and Jewish) theorist of degeneration, thought that emancipation led to assimilation which, in turn, led to a form of schizophrenia or neo-marranism (from marranos, pigs, the name disparagingly given to Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism but who secretly kept practicing Judaic rites). This schizophrenia, then, made assimilated Jews aesthetically repulsive to the rest of the national community. This theory is problematic, to say the least, since it seems to accept as fact the idea that the Jews are the unaesthetic in Western culture, which is the very basis of their destruction (see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger, l'art et la politique [Paris: Bourgois, 1987]). It nevertheless exemplifies the criticisms of emancipation coming from Jewish thinkers themselves. Dieckhoff mentions several of them in an essay whose central point is that the French universal ideal served as the philosophical basis of a Jewish particularist ideal - Zionism.
10. See "Les Logiques de l'émancipation et le sionisme," Histoire politique des juifs de France, 163-81.
11. See Poliakov, 142-43 and 156-57.
12. See Michel Wieviorka and Phyllis Cohen Albert, "L'Intégration et la persistance de l'ethnicité chez les juifs dans la France moderne," Histoire politique des juifs de France, 221-43.
13. On the progressive restructuration of the Jewish community after World War II, see Michel Wieviorka, "Le Juif, figure de l'étranger?" and Jean-Jacques Becker and Annette Wieviorka, ed., Les Juifs de France de la Révolution française à nos jours (Paris: Liana Levi, 1998).
14. For a discussion of this issue, see my article, "Deux récits, deux exigences: Les Jours de notre mort de David Roussel et La Nuit d'Elie Wiesel," Nottingham French Studies, 36:2 (Fall 1997), 71-82.
15. Annette Wieviorka, "Vers une communauté? Les Juifs en France depuis la guerre des Six-Jours," Les Juifs de France de la Révolution française à nos jours, 405.
16. See also Michel Wieviorka, "Le Juif, figure de l'étranger? " for whom the process of ethnicization of Jewish identity does not provide a sure protection to the community, but nonetheless represents a powerful improvement when coupled with a full inscription within democracy.
17. See Pierre Mathiot, "Le Sida dans la stratégie et la rhétorique du Front national," Pierre Favre, ed., Sida et politique: les premiers affrontements (1981-1987) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992), 189-201. Mathiot limits the intensive use of AIDS in the FN's rhetoric to the period between late 1986 and the summer 1987, and sees it as a matter of pure strategy within a specific context. It is true that the FN used the AIDS epidemic only insofar as it could strengthen its real focal point - immigration.
18. ACT UP-Paris was founded in June 1989, before the Gay Pride parade. ACT UP-New York, its model, was founded in 1987.
19. ACT UP-Paris, Le Sida: combien de divisions? (Paris: Dagorno, 1994), 307.
20. Maurice Tournier, "Le SIDA, anatomie d'un discours politique" in SIDA'venlure: SIDA, éthique, discriminations (Paris: Syllepse, 1989), 15-23, 15-16.
21. When he forged the terms sidaïque and sidatorium, Le Pen probably intended them to sound like judaïque and crematorium. Indeed, Bachelot repeatedly and explicitly connected AIDS and Jews, claiming that "The Jewish community and AIDS are linked. . . . A large part of the Jewish community in Paris is HIV-positive"; and "One fact is especially striking: there is a rare form of dermatosis, made of spots and nodules - Kaposi's sarcoma - mostly seen in Israelites over the age of sixty," probably implying that old Jews prey on young men (quoted by Tournier, 18). In France today, the accepted term for a person with AIDS is sidéen(ne).
22. The word tordu doesn't have the same direct connotations as "bent," but it does echo the expression folle tordue, a flaming queen, rather clearly.
23. Alain Ménil, Sain[t]s et saufs: sida, une épidémie de l'interprétation (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997).
24. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
25. I refer the reader to numerous articles by Jan Zita Grover, Paula Treichler, Simon Watney, and many early AIDS critics.
26. For an exemplary summary of that argument, which seeks to reactivate basic republican values to counter the FN, see Régis Debray, La République expliquée à ma fille (Paris: Seuil, 1998). For Debray, the citizen's responsibility is a central component of republican universalism.